Category Archives: Video
THE NBA LANDS IN INDIA
Mahanth S. Joishy is Editor of usindiamonitor
Basketball is a global sport and India is not to be left out. October 3 and 4, 2019 will go down in NBA and India history as the Pacers and Kings play a double-header of back to back pre-season games in Mumbai. Watch these videos about this first-ever occasion. Thanks to usindiamonitor’s favorite team Indiana Pacers for joining the Sacramento Kings in battle for Indian fans. I cannot even explain the thrill of seeing the likes of my beloved players like Myles Turner and Domantas Sabonis featured on billboards along Mumbai’s skyline- or riding around in an auto rickshaw. Let’s hope there’s many more games in India to come!
WATCH NOW: Grandpa Kitchen YouTube Channel
My new favorite cooking show on YouTube is an unlikely candidate. Being experienced in Indian cooking, I don’t often go online to find out how Indian people like to make things, because I can go to my mother or other personally known experts for subcontinental cuisine data mining. I’d rather learn about say, Chinese or South American recipes. So I was skeptical when YouTube’s AI algorithms suggested something new, which I very nearly skipped over. But Grandpa Kitchen is a program based in India that has stolen my heart, despite the cooking show not even having any sort of kitchen to speak of. And I’m not alone: there are millions of hits per video and a massive global fan base including nearly 6 million subscribers built up in just the last two years. You could call it a sensation, and it’s pretty unique at that.
Grandpa Kitchen features an elderly, weather-beaten gentleman with a gangster silver mustache who dons a lungi and does all of the cooking outdoors on a Telangana farm over open flames in giant pots, pans, or grills. The scenery is gorgeous and peaceful. The quantities of both vegetarian and non-vegetarian food being prepared are gigantic, because “Grandpa” Narayana Reddy and his team feed the food to a large group of needy town orphans at the end of every episode in a touching display of charity that never fails to melt my heart. The grub is also world-class, and besides Indian Grandpa expertly makes Japanese, Italian, American, Chinese, and other types of dishes exceedingly well. I have seen over a dozen episodes at this point, and every single recipe looks perfectly seasoned and on-point despite the massive quantities of seafood, vegetables, meat, fats and spices required each time. The ratio just gets nailed, along with the timing over an open fire. This guy has been living food all his life and it shows.
Perhaps best of all, like all great grandparents, Grandpa has this sense of humor that is at once disarmingly self-deprecating, compassionate, and cocky. Grandpa clearly knows he is now a celebrated star on YouTube, and he knows he is a master chef, but also accepts that his accent, limited use of English words, actions and mannerisms are all comical, so he hams it up. In one of my favorite mannerisms, in every episode you will see him introduce himself to the audience in a heavy Indian accent, “This is YOUR Grandpa!” Yes sir, mine are both long gone sadly, and I am letting you fill right in.
We cannot think of a better charity to get behind right now in India. Support this channel so they keep going! Watch it now for fun! Donate on their Patreon Page! Learn how to make some awesome food in the process!
Mahanth S. Joishy is Editor of usindiamonitor
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VIDEO: Is Dharam Pal Singh the Oldest Man Alive- and Oldest Marathoner at 119?
This is in extraordinary story already whether his age is true or not. I invite you to judge for yourself by viewing this video by The Atlantic Online.
WAR BREAKS OUT BETWEEN US & INDIA VS. CHINA & RUSSIA: WHO WOULD WIN?
Mahanth S. Joishy is Editor of usindamonitor
While browsing the quite engaging war scenarios by the Infographics Show, I came across a video that describes in advanced level of detail what could happen if a potential US-India alliance came to battle a Russia-China offensive. This video is relevant for several reasons. Most importantly, many have come to believe that these two sides present the front lines of the new 21st century “Cold War,” which needs to be recognized as a new world order slowly replacing the previous Cold War and its unstable aftermath we are living through today. This is in fact even the topic of an upcoming novel by usindiamonitor. Secondly, the world needs to prepare for these new alignments.
Is this terrible war scenario likely in the near future? We don’t think so. But we foreign policy mavens should get mentally prepared for what it would look like, and this video does a very good job of laying out the likeliest possibilities in the heat of a battle involving millions of soldiers and affecting billions of human beings. It’s worth watching! If nothing else, you will learn what the capabilities are of these four powerful militaries when thrown onto the chessboard in a time of grave peril.
Beard of Harmony & Yann Phayphet of India ROCK OUT with Tool Cover
Mahanth S. Joishy is Editor of usindiamonitor
For close to 25 years Tool has been considered one of the mightiest bands in the rock music universe. Rightly so- who else better encapsulates the intellectual lyrics, the genius mathematical precision, the mesmerizing vocals, heavy personal journeys, punishing drum solos, guitar riffs and bass lines, the deeply spiritual and even religious overtones with genre-bending orchestration?
Nobody, that’s who.
In a previous post about the best Western music ever inspired with Indian influences, unsurprisingly Tool made the top 5 list of Indo-American fusion songs of all time with Right in Two, a song about humanity’s own predictable demise.
Separately, we have talked about the blistering hot hard rock/ metal scene which is taking hold in India, especially among young people. Some ferocious bands who have mixed metal with Hindu religious influences in the last few decades deserve to be heard around the world.
Today I would like to introduce you to another little pleasure bomb: an engaging acoustic cover song recorded live by talented Indian dudes of the aforementioned song, “Right in Two.” This is a homage within a homage, as an Indian band covers an American band that deftly utilizes India’s ageless somnambulance perfectly back in America for the whole world to enjoy.
And what better way than with a tight video by Beard of Harmony & Yann Phayphet where you can see an Indian neighborhood and hear Indian background noises like nowhere else in the world?
CAN YOU DIG IT:
HELP NAB THE INDIAN MAN ON FBI’S TEN MOST WANTED LIST
The FBI recently tweeted about the history of its famous, or infamous, 10 Most Wanted list. Out of curiosity I went online to check out who the current fugitives from the law on the list are. I was surprised to learn one of them is Indian-born Bhadreshkumar Chetanbhai Patel, a man who brutally murdered his wife by repeatedly stabbing her at the Dunkin Donuts where they worked in Maryland, and made a run for it, potentially abroad. Please see video above for more details.
I know that a lot of Indians and others around the world visit this site and don’t like these kinds of headlines giving us all a bad name. If any of you have info about Patel and are willing to call this one in, there is a reward of up to $100,000 waiting for you. I would love one of my readers to be the one to help nail this alleged monster’s ass to the wall.
tips.fbi.gov
800-CALL-FBI
Mahanth S. Joishy is Editor of usindiamonitor
Michael Jackson’s Love Affair with India
2016 MJ Statue Unveiling Ceremony in Chennai. via indiawest.com
We now know that American Empire reached its peak in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s before the inevitable downward slide we’re now stuck on. While American power was bringing the USSR or Iraq to its knees (a favor those Cold Warrior Comrades and ISIS monsters are paying us back in {//:spades//} this moment), it was also ripping the existing world’s popular music scene playbook to shreds and tossing it into the ocean. Michael Jackson, the foremost cultural artifact that America produced at the apex of its very highest peak, romped freely across the Earth to sold-out stadiums and crying adult fans who urinated themselves and thought suicidal thoughts paradoxically stemming from uncontrollable pure love and joy emotions. People didn’t know how to feel the feelings they were feeling around the King of Pop.
That transition from 80’s into 90’s was also MJ’s peak as far as we can tell on all objective metrics except what was in this bizarre and gifted human’s mind. Physically he was indisputably in top dance and voice form. He was simply the greatest entertainer to ever live. Not only was he pair bonding with the attractive spawn of Elvis Presley himself, MJ was as yet unstained or unsullied by charges of child molestation and other uniquely weird and mysterious life trajectories which would dog him around until his premature but perhaps merciful death in 2009 (on usindiamonitor‘s wedding day).
In the neverland that time forgot, before Internet and social media, MJ went more viral than a vicious flu outbreak. His raw and sexual tentacle porn tentacles tickled everything and everywhere. Virtually all of India’s youth knew Michael Jackson, the endless child. In this the nation was truly unexceptional. India was just another domino in the collective soul of North America, South America, Africa, Europe, and Australasia to fall for Michael Jackson’s dance moves and inimitable androgynous silken voice despite thousands of years of glorious indigenous music tradition.
Michael Jackson’s torrid love affair with India was the song and dance- the very pillars of the mutual admiration society. Here’s Michael Jackson dancing Bharatanatyam in the Black or White Video! And we couldn’t hate him for it despite its canned and ambitious theme of racial tolerance, which Indians were in desperate need of in the United States and India and everywhere else. Here’s Michael Jackson emerging on a stage in Bombay from a f***ing spaceship in a f***ing spacesuit! In an alien world, Michael Jackson fit right in, right as rain during monsoon season.
India was all in for MJ. If you peer close enough, the various shades of MJ’s skin over the years exactly matched those of different Indian gene pools. Lookalikes and lounge acts sprouted up from Kashmir to Kannyakumari, from Bajagoli to Bengal, from Chennai to Chowpatty Beach to Chandigarh. Kids and adults at home, in the streets, at wedding halls, in the slums and on the riverbanks danced joyously to MJ’s music as only Indians can. College students dressed up and jerry-curled like him, riding their BMX bicycles to class like it wasn’t no thing.
At many a nadir in US-India relations, MJ was a far superior and more effortless US diplomat, friend, and representative than any government official could hope to be. He represented so much that was great about the American story. In a land littered with brutal racists, religious bigotry, misogyny and caste chauvinism, Indians loved this black man as their own. In this, again, India was no exception. MJ’s blackness is almost an afterthought in society, so transcendental was the King of Pop.
There will never be another Michael Jackson in pop music, just as America will never be great “again.” There will be an endless parade of mediocrity and self-absorbed pop tarts grabbing their 15 minutes of fame until the next generation completes their first menstrual cycles and nocturnal emissions just in time to grab the frame and assault our sensibilities on what is good in this world.
Michael Jackson lives on in India. In 2016, a 10-foot statue cut from a single black stone from my home state of Karnataka (like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial) was dedicated to Michael Jackson utilizing an unmistakably Indian sculpting method, the star forever frozen in a hot place to the soundtrack of Beat It. In a meta-story for the ages, at the unveiling was the Tamillionaire Prabhu Deva himself (pictured above), India’s answer and living homage to Michael Jackson. The sizzling Indian dancer owes much to his spiritual mentor, just as Martin Luther King, Jr. did to Mahatma Gandhi on the time/space bridge of black and brown. The statue of Michael looks suspiciously like an Indian holy man. And that suits us just fine.
Mahanth Joishy is Editor of usindiamonitor. He is OK with sharing initials with the more famous person in this case.
VIDEO: A Shotgun Wedding in Bihar
People across the United States and India often joke and laugh about “shotgun weddings,” where a man is forced to make an honest woman out of a woman by marrying her, and if he were to refuse, he’d be staring down the barrel of a gun, which say somethin’ diff’rent. Usually it’s the bride’s father holding the firearm, and it’s almost always due to the girl having gotten pregnant.
Most people have never had to see one happen. However, a real-life shotgun wedding caught on video this week has taken the world by storm. Engineer Vinod Kumar was actually kidnaped from a friend’s wedding, beaten up or “thrashed” as they like to say in India by the bride’s family goondas, and then forced to get married at gunpoint at another location. He was brought there bound, as you can see in the video, and clearly against his will. It’s not funny at all. The poor guy cried during the ceremony, while it’s unclear whether the veiled bride on the left was trying to console him, or felt sad for what her family was doing to this guy. Fortunately, the police are investigating in this case, although sometimes people are even scared to report cases to a corrupt government apparatus which may do nothing but more harm.
It’s now 2018. Marriage kidnappings are unfortunately all too common in India, but usually it’s a woman who is captured to be the bride. Whether it’s a bride or groom, this type of behavior is completely illegal, morally unacceptable, and wholly unbecoming of a country that wants a larger role in world affairs. We show this video not as entertainment, but to inform and galvanize a society that should never let this happen to men or women, period.
Mahanth S. Joishy is Editor of usindiamonitor
VIDEO: Does the Simpsons’ Apu Need a Do-Over?
Comedian Hari Kondabulu gave millions of Indians around the world a voice by tackling the subject of Apu from the multi-decade hit cartoon sitcom, The Simpsons. He decided to make a documentary film called “The Problem with Apu” on TruTV which asks some fundamental questions about Apu and why he has to be the way he is. As we all know, Apu is a minstrel with a fake accent and his appearances comprise an unending parade of unforgivably unfunny stereotypes of an Indian convenience store owner in any town USA.
So ingrained is Apu on the world’s consciousness that when I went to a remote region of Brazil where they never see any Indians, many of the locals nicknamed me Apu for the week. This is literally the first thing that people who have never met Indians think about when they see an Indian.
The documentary is worth watching, whether you believe Indians are being way too sensitive about Apu, or you are outraged by the minstrel portrayal of Indians by white voice actor, Hank Azaria. Above you will see the TruTV trailer.
Mahanth S. Joishy is Editor of usindiamonitor
Um, Om? WHAT Hindu Heavy Metal Music Scene?
Mahanth S. Joishy is Editor of usindiamonitor
India isn’t exactly a hotbed of heavy metal. The airwaves over there are packed with film-style dance numbers derived from Bollywood, bhangra, and various poppy Western influences. There’s a millennia-long tradition of music in India, but it’s usually been slim pickings for those of us lifelong heavy metal fans. On the occasions where rock music is even to be found anywhere in India, it’s almost always soft in nature. To be fair, most Indians have never properly heard heavy metal. However, I’ve thought for some years now that this could all change- that India is even becoming ripe for a heavy metal revolution!
It’s only appropriate. India is hardcore, man. India is a sensation seeker’s dream, with a vibrant and colorful spiritual culture, an exceedingly wide range of flavor profiles and smells, rollicking cities overflowing into breathtaking landscapes, ancient and modern architecture on top of each other, oppressive political ferment, and the crush of people and traffic in every direction. It’s hotter than hell in most of India most of the time. India is an assault on your senses. What can possibly be more METAL than that?
Meanwhile, Hinduism probably lends itself better to the all-out thrash power of metal than it’s generally credited for. The sitar, tablas, bhajans, mantras, and shlokas of Hinduism can entrance, hypnotize, and more at their best. The mythology is filled with colorful characters, moral conundrums, epic battle scenes, powerful weapons, gruesome demons, sexual symbolism, and savage animalistic imagery such as many-armed Goddesses carrying the bleeding heads of vanquished foes as souvenirs, or the lion-headed avatar Narasimha ripping an enemy in half with his bare hands. Imagine imagining this bloody milieu with raw metal guitar, bass, and drum power behind it. Again I ask you, what could possibly be more METAL than that?
Finally, we have the demographic bulge. It’s no secret that metal is a young person’s game. India is a young country, with 845 million people under the age of 35, many of them jumping on the Internet or television for the first time to partake in Western influenced culture, including music. The best American import is arriving in force.
And thus, an earnest, nascent Hindu/Vedic heavy metal scene has formed in India and abroad. It took your correspondent a few forays down the Internet rabbit hole to discover it, but it’s definitely there. There’s a long way to go for Hindu metal to fill more than a nook in the niche cranny. Particularly missing in my view is enough melodic singing to match the guitar riffs. The scene is far from mature but more than anything, I see potential and opportunity. Below are some of the bands you can find along with example tracks for a pretty elaborate curated survey. No matter what you think of the music, these bands are truly pioneers, merging the great traditions of Hinduism and hard rock. If there are others I missed, please mention them in the comments below!
The Down Troddence. These guys flat-out rock. After I came across this song today, I couldn’t get enough of their music. Not surprisingly, there’s many a Shiva themed song on our list, with this one simply titled, Shiva. The Down Troddence is a six-piece that hails from Kerala. I haven’t heard all of the songs by all of these bands yet but as of now I consider this the most technically competent band among the lot.
Motherjane. A bit less heavy, and a bit more classical influence than the others on this list, Motherjane is an eminently listenable band with a melodic and well-orchestrated sound. Chasing the Sun as a bonus also features an excellent video which could only be made in India. They remind me a bit of the excellent Pakistani band Junoon. I wish I had heard of Motherjane sooner.
Moksh the Band. Fronted by a woman named Ishrat Rajan on vocals, and managed by lead guitarist/singer Ashish Wilson, this Shimla four-piece has been kicking around its incarnations since 2003. In recent years the band decided to take on a ditty about Shiva the Destroyer himself with Shiv Tandav Stotram. In keeping with the spirit of Hinduism, the video is meant to provoke awareness of those who lost their lives in natural disasters.
Rudra. This foursome of bad boy Hindus hails from Singapore, and has been jamming out since 1992. They are quite likely the first band to have earned the so-called Hindu metal mantle. There are unmistakable hints of ancient India in the song Now Therefore including a conch call to start the proceedings. I like more melody in my metal vocals, but this style should appeal to many of you metal heads out there and the instrumentals are solid.
Millennium. To be honest, Millennium was formed as an 80’s hair metal band with Christian members and no Hindu influence. The song Only be One in fact uses overt Christian imagery such as crosses and coffins. That being said, this band formed in Bangalore in 1986. They are considered to be one of the first, if not the first, successful metal band from India. Props! Rock out!
Indus Creed. While Indus Creed straddles the line between pop rock (not exactly my jam) and hard rock, they deserve mention as one of the indisputable giants in India’s rock music history. Rock ‘N Roll Renegade was one of their early hits from their debut album of the same name in the 80’s, and helped launch them into the pantheon of India’s rock stratosphere. In fact, Indus Creed helped pave the way for all of the other bands in this list. Respect.
Cult of Fire. Hinduism is for all, and this Czech Republic band proves that Hindu metal is a globalized phenomenon. The song Kali Ma is mostly instrumental, but it shows the range of talent possessed by Cult of Fire. The below video splices a bunch of Hindi Hindu film footage into the song. Judge for yourself whether Kajol and Sridevi dressed like Goddesses with heavy metal in the background actually works…
Dying Out Flame. OK, first of all, this band looks absolutely hardcore. Right? They also rock righteously, they’re co-ed, plus they have cool album art (see top). Formed in 2011, this band hails from the Hindu majority nation of Nepal, adding more to the international flavor of Hindu metal. Shiva Rudrastakam pays tribute to Lord Shiva- in case you aren’t noticing a trend here?
Demonic Resurrection. This particular band was formed by four teenagers at the start of the new millennium. The Mumbai band has kept on, and helped bring other metal bands into the fold through singer Sahil Makhija’s Deamonstealer Records. Of particular interest in the song Matsya- The Fish and others is a seamless and welcome integration of sitar into the metal.
Dhwesha. This band’s punishing style puts the death into death metal. Another Bangalore band, Dhwesha actually sings in Kannada- though it’s nearly impossible to tell. In their self-titled song from 2014, you can choose to witness the see-saw between uplift and despair. It’s worth it.
This list of course cannot do justice to the entire music library each of these bands has, nor is it meant to be a complete listing of Hindu or Vedic heavy metal. Hopefully you have been exposed to a world you didn’t know about, and enjoyed it as much as I have.
There’s a musical revolution under way, and you have gotten in on the ground floor.
Picture credits:
- Dying Out Flame album art
- Demonic Resurrection album art
- Down Troddence concert by Anup B Vyas
- Dying Out Flame album art
- Om guitar pick, Zazzle.com
